 This seminar takes place in the run-up to the 30th session of the Intergovernmental Committee that meets from May 30 to June 3 and it addresses intellectual property and genetic resources. The seminar provides a wonderful opportunity for the negotiators in the IGC to meet less formally and discuss the key unresolved issues in a less formal context. We have marvellous speakers from around the world, 25 different countries representing governments, indigenous peoples and industry. The seminar will address four main unresolved issues. The first is the interface between the work of WIPO and other processes and the second are the policy objectives, which is a key outstanding question. The third roundtable addresses the disclosure requirement and the fourth roundtable addresses databases, and I'm very hopeful that the seminar will be a very good lead-in to the IGC session starting on Monday. So today's seminar we were talking about international legal instruments that are related to genetic resources and to indigenous and local communities and small-scale farmers and how they relate to one another and how they relate to the negotiations going on here at WIPO. And what we've really discovered is that these instruments were created piecemeal and one would react to another one and so instead of just saying, oh what is happening in this mandate? What are the, you know, are we trying to achieve here at WIPO and what are the beneficiaries that we are trying to affect? We need to actually look across instruments and ask what are the objectives and beneficiaries across them, but also what impact do we have on other instruments who's benefiting, but who also might be harmed, who might lose, and what does that mean for public policy? So the real message I think today was to get beyond the narrow mandates and to look more broadly so that public policy makers can have a more systematic view and make better policy. And this seminar was very useful, I think, and hopefully it will inform some of the discussions that are coming up for this new session of the IGC. We're in a new context with a renewed mandate from the IGC, as well as last year having concluded at the United Nations level the Sustainable Development Goals, also the conclusion and a new agreement on climate change. So we have a broad framework that now should also inform the continuation of negotiations in the IGC. This session I tried to discuss the linkages with other international legal frameworks, in particular the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization Treaty on Pantanalytic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Alongside other important instruments in the area of human rights law, as we know there is important developments taking place with regards to rights of peasants and other rural workers, as well as with regards to transnational corporations and so regulating some business practices. And then the Intellectual Property Framework is in this discussion finding a place for how it should evolve to also find coherence in the implementation and complement the objectives of the broad overall legal framework. So I very much look forward to the discussions in the IGC next week. Yes, basically what I was saying is that when you're talking about the objectives of what the IGC is trying to accomplish around genetic resources, there's no need to look specifically at the ABS system because the ABS system functions outside of the Intellectual Property System. You should concentrate on what the Intellectual Property System needs to do to make ABS work. And what it needs to do is it needs to do what it does, which is provide information. It needs to do that better and it needs to provide information on the origin and source of genetic resources and traditional knowledge by having a disclosure requirement. Because that is exactly what Intellectual Property System does and ABS will be taken care of under national legislation and outside of the IP system. My message today was three, I focused on three policy objectives and the most important of these was the use of, well, the promotion of innovation through the patent system. The patent system, according to a number of economic studies, has been shown to increase the number of jobs in small companies to increase sales and to increase a firm's chance of success overall. We have a proposal on the table called a new disclosure requirement that could threaten the grant of a patent and also revoke a patent. But this could have the potential to take away these incentives that are provided under the patent system, so that is of a big concern to the U.S. delegation. Some alternatives would be to focus on objectives such as providing relevant prior art to patent examiners. I mentioned earlier the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, which is a wonderful database produced by the Indian Council of Scientific Industrial Research and how that tool has been valuable at USPTO. It's also been used by other offices such as the European Patent Office and how a study by Professor Chowdhury looked at the implications of the use of the TKDL and how it has impacted patent quality and other factors. And it found that after use of the TKDL, patent grants on herbal inventions tend to be more distinct from the prior art and less weak patents. So we see that as an area that could become a further work stream in the IGC. And we also see another area that could be a further work stream is the use of national laws outside of the intellectual property system. That's another objective. And I gave earlier the example of the U.S. National Park System, Yellowstone National Park in particular, where national laws were created that would require bioprospectors to obtain permits in order to collect samples. And as a part of the permit process, they'd have to enter into cooperative research and development agreements that would allow us to transfer benefits and to prevent misappropriation. All these concepts are very much relevant to the discussion next week because I believe that the objectives are key to driving the negotiations next week and coming up with a meaningful outcome. For the General Secretariat of the Andean Community, it's a pleasure to be here. And to draw attention to some issues that have to do with the protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources in general. And in particular, for the four countries that integrate the Andean Community, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. These four countries are very diverse and as a consequence of this, this heritage must be protected. For this reason, the Andean Community, since 1996, has a normative respect for the protection of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, making a very strong link with intellectual property. We also have the Andean decision, 486, that also assists the 391 decision because they don't consider intellectual property rights, as long as these have been requested in violation of a norm that contradicts the genetic heritage of the Andean Community countries. Therefore, it is important to be able to avoid an inappropriate appropriation of traditional knowledge and genetic resources in our countries, is to have adequate information. And this adequate information, as an objective of politics, has to be clear, complete, true and opportunistic information so that both the patent examiners and the people who externally would like to be able to prevent someone from appropriating a traditional knowledge or a genetic resource indefinitely can carry out the actions of the case. And for this reason, the Andean Community is working in support of its countries and the countries will have to make some negotiation decisions, both in multilateral forums such as this one, both within the Andean forum and for this reason, the countries would seem to be ready to start a reform process of the Andean normative related to traditional knowledge and genetic resources. Today I spoke about the very recent changes in Brazilian legislation concerning biodiversity. The law entered into force late last year and the rules of application were just released two weeks ago, so we are still learning about how to implement everything, but the important point is that the previous act on biodiversity had serious flaws, it stifled innovation, it was very punitive, and so we did not take fuller advantage of our own biodiversity wealth. As you know, Brazil is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, so we introduced a new disclosure requirement. There was one in place, but this one is very easy to comply with. So it's simple, it doesn't take any time, and businesses were heard, traditional communities were heard, users and producers were heard, and this law was voted with a large majority in the time of political polarization. I think that this attitude, learning from one's mistakes and trying to fine-tune the system all the time is something that can maybe contribute to discussions next week. We were ready to share this experience more closely with other delegations, and of course we are here also to listen and to hear from everyone. So I'm the moderator of the Round Table 3 and I'm fully convinced that it is of importance and of benefit for delegates if they have a look at the WIPA website where they can see what we discussed again. Because we looked at the highly important issue of disclosure requirement from different angles. And you know what? We reached consensus on many things, on how to move forward. The most important thing in order to move forward is to disentangle the discussions, to distinguish between focusing on the design of a new system of disclosure requirements and to focus on the underlying principles. By recognizing the underlying principles, I'm convinced that we all will reach a win-win solution. A win-win solution is a solution that gives not only minimal requirements on an international level, but maybe also maximal requirements so that both sides, users and those who give the resources to the system can benefit. To conclude, I would like to quote what a former US president said when he was asked on how to make progress. And he said, you have to be aware, if we always do what we always did, we will always get what we always got. Or to say it in a different way, when Stacey Allison, the first woman to climb Mount Everest, was asked, how did she succeed? She said, you know what? It's these little steps. They aren't up. My main message really was to remind us that most of the world's population is already under a disclosure regime. This is an international moment for the community of all member states of Waipo to come together to establish minimum baselines and to give us some ground rules that can guide countries as they begin to discover how best to design their national disclosure rules. I'm hoping that this will feed into the IGC debate and discussion and negotiations next week. Given the reality of the disclosure requirement, given the importance of cross-border innovation, the disclosure requirement is now more than ever an imperative and getting the design right requires everyone to participate. Important message is that the databases are playing an important role in preventing misappropriation of traditional knowledge. India has the experience of developing possibly the first major database on traditional knowledge. We call it the traditional knowledge digital library. This database is being used to challenge a lot of erroneously granted patents in several jurisdictions. We are using this database to good effect. A large number of patents have already been revoked. We are doing it in partnership with 10 patent offices in different countries and the number of patent offices will grow as we expand the work of the TKDL. The other important thing that is there for us is that we also have databases developing at the local community level. You know that the local communities are protecting the knowledge and the resources for us. In India, we are developing what we call People's Biodiversity Registers, which is a database of the knowledge and the genetic resources which are owned by the local communities. And this to my mind will provide a very good basis for granting positive protection to the local communities. Well, the participation in the seminar was very useful. I was very much interested in the disclosure requirement discussions, which I felt was very interesting because we were able to discuss in detail the scope and the level of disclosure that is required in national and regional and international norm setting process. I also participated as a speaker in the defensive measures session and I realized that there was a lot of interest in trying to find out the role that databases play in the IGC discussions. And in my view, I think databases are complementary to the discussions of identifying or concluding an international instrument. And I believe if this approach is taken, we will be able to reach consensus on this. Even though some people questioned the role of databases in such an examination of national patent officers, we still felt that probably they may be the need for us to differentiate those databases, those that are publicly available, those that are actually held confidential. And if we also approach databases development this way, I believe we will be able to protect the interests of the indigenous and local communities whilst at the same time also use elements of the databases which are already published as prior art to prevent a runner's grant or patents. I think for the discussions of this week and also next week, we have to focus on the common objectives that we all have, which is ensuring that there is an effective system to have compliance with ABS rules and also that we are looking at the objectives of an IP system, which is for instance avoiding the erroneous granting of patents. It is the industry's opinion that there is already a lot of work done in national laws, regional laws to ensure there is effective compliance with ABS laws, but that there is reinforcement to be done on IP issues related to the erroneous granting of patents through facilitating systems. However, linking the two together by having disclosure obligations to ensure compliance with ABS systems to us doesn't seem to be an effective way of dealing with these issues. And so we hope that the debates we had this week would be very useful for the discussions that the delegates will have next week for an informed discussion and maybe agreement on things. Well, my main message at this seminar has been to give a traditional knowledge holders perspective on the utilization of databases. And what I've suggested is that national databases are going to be limited in their accuracy because of all the issues around sacred knowledge and mistrust of passing on knowledge to government agencies, and you're more likely to find accurate databases at a local level that are managed by communities. So I felt it was important to make that intervention here and feed it into next week's IGC as states begin to explore in more detail how functional these databases can be. Hi. My name is China Williams. I'm from the Royal Botanic Gardens Q. I took part in this seminar to give everyone an idea of the kind of databases that are created at Q, primarily scientific databases. Q recently did a study that showed that there are over 30,000 plants have a recorded plant use and that's out of a total of 400,000 plants. So we need to record a lot more uses. One of the key issues that we've heard that we heard from pattern officers is needing consistency in searches. So I think one of the things that scientific databases can help with is helping find the right names for plants and also a consistency in the way that plant use is recorded. The seminar has just finished and I'm getting very good feedback on it. The people who participated are saying first of all it was very frank, honest, people very open about what's happening at the national level, which is very good. It was also very substantive and factual, a lot of rich information about what's happening in each country. And finally I think they appreciated the very explicit link to next week's IGC session. So I'm very confident that the seminar has set the stage for next week. I think all the delegates are fully into the issues. The atmosphere was also this week at the seminar very, very good. I'm confident that substantively and in terms of the atmosphere will have a productive and good IGC session next week. All the resources from the seminar are on the website. There's all the videos, the short interviews and all the power points and encourage those watching this to go and look at those rich resources. Thank you.